This year will be a little different. Instead of me guessing, I’ve asked Gilbert Kruidiner to combine his efforts on his Change Demographic survey with what I’ve been doing in order to create something that is for the community, by the community. While this is being posted on leanchange.org, the finished product will be posted somewhere else, under a different name, will be completely free and will not be sponsored by me, my properties or any other organization. If you want to skip my observed trends, head to the bottom of the post and let us know what data you want included in the report!

For now, I’ll kick off with what the most popular pieces of content were on leanchange.org and Linked In to see what people seem to be interested in the most:

This page has been viewed more than twice as many times as any other page on this site. This tells me that while there is plenty of anti-tool rhetoric out there, there is still a great deal of value in tools that help people make sense of their context.

2. Meaningful Dialogue through Storytelling (7800+ views on Linked In and Leanchange.org)

This post went live last month so it’s surprising to see how popular it was. I attribute this to a few things. I think the ‘traditional change community’ that has typically relied on either a favorite method or an association to guide what they learn, has started poking around more creative aspects of change.

3. A Manifesto for Agile Change Management (7200+ views on Linked In)

I wrote this post in response to the growing popularity of agile within change management. I found that the general sentiment throughout 2018 moved towards doing-change-at-people-more-effectively by integrating agile tools and techniques. After spending the last 15+ years working on agile teams as a scrum master, coach (internal and external), product owner, tester, change person and more, the most important lesson I learned was that the definition of agile will depend on how the majority of people in your organization view it. Meaning is the most important thing, a standardized definition doesn’t.

4. The Discipline Formerly Known as Change Management (5600+ views on Linked In)

While this didn’t have the most views, it had the most comments, likes and shares. The point of the article was to see what people were saying when they claim that change management is dead. I wrote a post many years back after being pulled into the conversation on twitter and people have been writing about this since 2012. By the way, ‘agile is dead’ has been written about since around the same time so it’s a natural evolution of any discipline methinks. It’s the author(s)’s way of saying, “you know, something’s not working…let’s talk“

The amount of interaction on this post tells me more people are interested in exploring better ways to facilitate change because change is a topic in every discipline nowadays from coaching to leadership, to business, agile, HR, and beyond.

This was a summary of a keynote I gave for Agile HR Finland and was inspired by Nina Karlsson who created a sketch-note of the talk. The main idea is that knowledge is free nowadays, the heart and soul of a change agent matters more than a method, certification, or process. Find your groove and focus on what matters.

Honorable Mentions:

Your Lessons, and What You’re Looking Foward to in 2019

I asked on Linked In a couple of months ago about how to change my annual post into something more community driven, and surprisingly, zero people provided input! While Gibert and I co-ordinate our efforts, I’d like to ask you 7 questions we can use as input into the creation of a community-driven, and FREE report that you can use however you wish.

I began my career as a web developer when Cold Fusion roamed the earth. Over the following years, I moved into management, Agile Coaching and consulting. The bumps and bruises I collected along the way helped me realize that helping organizations adopt Agile practices was less about the practices, and all about change.
In 2008 I attended an experiential learning conference (AYE) about how people experience change and since then, I’ve been writing, and speaking, all over the world about helping organizations discover more effective practices for managing organizational change.